One of a civilization’s key tasks is to establish a framework around the exercise of power. This applies to the exercise of power both within a society and between societies.
This is installment #4 in what is now an occasional series on “What kind of society and polity do we want for ourselves and our countries?” The first three installments are here, here, and here. As with the previous OPs in this series, I ask folks to assiduously avoid discussing current events and personalities. Specifically:
I want to encourage: Discussion about shared values and not-shared values; discussion in the abstract about political structures; discussion about how systems design can help or hinder us from creating the kind of society we want to live in.
I want to discourage: Discussion about current events; any mention at all of the current or previous President of the United States; any comments about any current political party. In short, anything that can knock us off the abstract game and into tribal warfare.
If you want to discuss current events, parties, and personalities, there’s always Breaking News.
A basic bargain in society is that the government gets more or less a monopoly on exercising hard power over us in return for providing security and stability (and typically other services as well). The hard power of the government, exercised through laws and law enforcement, is supposed to keep us from clobbering each other over the head whenever we feel like it, or stealing others’ stuff just because we want it. This schema works pretty well in a functioning society.
A problem arises, though, when it comes to relationships between societies. Throughout most of history, there has been no analogous power to keep one society from clobbering another or stealing their stuff. The result: Warfare. It got really ugly in the 20th Century. Germany decided it wanted Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, so it just took them. Japan decided it wanted China, so it invaded. They went on to threaten the US, Russia, and England, and before you know it we had a Second World War.
When that unpleasantness was over, the survivors got together and decided they would really like to avoid doing that again and promoted the idea of a rules based international order. The idea is that just like within a society, we create rules that countries have to follow in relationship to each other, and we band together to enforce those rules. For example: Rule: All countries must respect other countries’ sovereignty. Enforcers: NATO, United Nations.
This vision has never come to full fruition for a variety of reasons, but it has arguably contributed to the relatively peaceful, stable, and prosperous global scene over the past 70 years.
Not everyone favors the rules based international order. An alternative conception is spheres of influence. In that conception, regional powers dominate their own neighborhoods and can impose their will through force within their own “back yards.” They are not bound by rules or international institutions but use their power to impose order in their neighborhoods. Traditionally, this is thought of as, China gets Asia, the US gets the Americas, and Russia gets the historical Soviet Union.
Questions:
Do you favor one vision over the other? Why?